College students aren't college level

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Mastercraft
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19 Oct 2018, 12:13 pm

I am currently in my third semester of community college for a computer science major. As part of my studies, I had to take two English classes, which I have already completed in my first and second semester.

Right now, I am taking World History as an elective. For midterms, the assignment is to write an essay on whether you believe that the Crimean War was the first, true Modern War, or whether it was simply a precursor or foreshadowing of things to come in the World War period.

It's a fairly simple idea, but the professor has had to tell us exactly how to structure the paragraphs, how much evidence is needed to verify your claims, and even how many sentences are needed for a paragraph. The fact that she has to do this implies that in the past, lazy students have tried to get away with less than the required amount.

In fact, in my aforementioned English classes, I was the undisputed highest level student in my class. I enjoy reading and writing, and prefer to think of myself as an amateur writer, at least in level. However, most of the other students wrote in what I would call a first-grade level. The sentence structure was short and blunt, they lacked anything but the most basic knowledge of simile and metaphor, and grammar was nonexistent.

Annoyingly, when we passed papers around to edit them, I would find that they edited my paper wrong, thinking that a semicolon is the same as a colon or comma and accusing me of creating run-on sentences or other nonsense.

The point I am making is that, despite passing high school and being in a college atmosphere, so many people are either too lazy or paradoxically uneducated to write with the grace and power that an educated student should have, thereafter obliterating my ideal of college life.

Have any of my fellow collegians noticed something similar?



Piobaire
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19 Oct 2018, 12:36 pm

I dropped out of school at 16 and was homeless for the next 5 years. I passed the high school equivalency test, attended a community college, and then transferred to university, eventually graduating cum laude with a Master's degree. I was reading well beyond grade level, and was absolutely shocked to see and hear how the majority of my high-school graduate classmates were barely capable of reading and writing on a "Dick & Jane" level; literally a 4th grade literacy equivalent. I didn't think of them as lazy, as much as somehow deprived of a proper education despite having received their diplomas. To gain any traction in any of their other collegiate studies, they must have struggled terribly.



Mastercraft
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19 Oct 2018, 1:15 pm

Personally, when I was in high school, I was bullied so bad that I was suspended three times a year at least (my school operated on the ideology that it was easier to punish the victim than to reprimand the bully). In my senior year of high school, a rumor circulated that I would come into the school with a gun to shoot people. Police got involved (who never bothered to find the person who started the rumor, who got off scot-free), and I ended up being taken out of school to be privately tutored for my last year.

After that, I joined the Army but dropped out of basic training (if I had been diagnosed back then, I wouldn't have been able to join in the first place). I spent the next 3 years of my life homeless, hopping from relative to relative as I struggled to find work in the tail-end of the recession. I even spent a summer living out a tent.

Afterwards, I went into a trade school, which ended up a waste a money, though it led me to a two-year career in a phone-based customer support company, which was hell for me. When they laid me off the day after Christmas (I didn't get Christmas off either), I started college.

And I'm able to maintain a steady 3.2 average despite not being in school for over 6 years, while 18-year-old adults, straight out of high school, are utterly unable to care for themselves, constantly change majors as though they think they aren't paying for every class they take, miss class whenever they feel like it, and when they do show up, perform at a level that would make them immediately fail the 'Are You Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader?' game show.

The world is a weird place.



Grammar Geek
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19 Oct 2018, 1:21 pm

We can’t all be blessed with your gifts. I have a debilitating learning disability that led me to struggle through college, although I graduated. I’m very good at a few things, like grammar and spelling, but I never knew how to make my essays long enough. I had extreme struggles with math because of my memory-retrieval impairment; I had to drop College Algebra. I couldn’t do anything that required free recall, such as essay questions or fill-in-the-blanks without word banks. I could study my ass off for weeks and still fail tests that were like that. I didn’t do well with tryling to learn Photoshop or InDesign because it’s all free recall; what others learned and mastered in a year would probably take me four years. But I went to college because I wanted a good job, and college is nearly a requirement to get good jobs nowadays. That’s why you’re not seeing just the best and brightest like you in college.



Mastercraft
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19 Oct 2018, 1:37 pm

To GrammarGeek, I apologize if I have inadvertently insulted you by neglecting to mention those who struggle with issues that prevent them from excelling in their chosen field. It was rude and careless of me to not mention that I have no grief with that, and I do strive to help my fellow students with that which causes them stress.

To get to the point, the people that I am speaking of are the NTs who either fail to understand the blatant or those who have the skill but refuse to use it. I do not expect people to have my skills in writing, which are the direct result of my social issues as a child. I had no friends to play with, and being that my parents were poor, I didn't have video games to play or internet to surf. I was a child in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and my parents couldn't afford cable, so there was nothing to watch most of the time, besides old VHS tapes.

To alleviate the ever-present boredom, I turned to books, devouring fantasy novel after novel. As such, my skill at writing increased exponentially as a child. When I became an adult, I got into the My Little Pony fandom, and began to role-play with other fans online, increasing my skill. So therefore, I am at the top of my class in school, and directly tell the other students to regard me as an anomaly, not a benchmark.

However, in my Calculus class (for which you need to either pass the course requirements when taking the entrance exam or, in my case, take the prerequisite Algebra and Trigonometry courses), there is an older woman who seems to take issue with the oddest things.

For example, the professor will tell us that x=5, and then use that number in an equation to help us understand it, as all math teachers are wont to do. After the professor finishes her explanation, the woman will raise her hand and ask how the professor knew that x=5. The professor will explain that 5 is just a random number used for example, and the woman will shake her head and once again ask how to solve for x to get 5.

For whatever reason, she can't wrap her head around examples. Whenever the professor tells us to memorize certain equations, such as that the derivative of sin is cos, she neglects to do so, and will then turn to me in class and ask me to explain it to her. I will try to, but she won't get it, and I will end up staying after class to explain, over and over, what the professor told us in class. Sometimes, it will be both the professor and I explaining to her, and she rarely gets it.

I have no idea how she managed to get into this class, or if she has some disability, but I cannot fathom how she gets caught up on this stuff, but not the actual work.



naturalplastic
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25 Oct 2018, 6:42 pm

Jadewyatt wrote:
Hello, I am a professional academic writer at Dissertation Educators which helps university students to write an assignment, dissertation, essay, and coursework.


Since you're a "professional academic writer" why didn't you drop the other she, and tell us all WTF your point is? :lol:

I notice that this is the first and only post that you have ever made on Wrong planet.

What did you do?

Find this thread when you googled "college illiteracy" and then decide to advertise your services here without reading the thread first (so you would have known that no one here is in the market)?